IT Salary Survey December 2022¶

An anonymous salary survey has been traditionally conducted annually since 2015 among European IT specialists in Germany. Below, you will find an in-depth comparative analysis of the aggregated anonymised responses from voluntary participants.

Purpose: to learn a competitive value of a skillset for IT specialists depending on years of experience, position, level, etc.

Audience: most respondents are expats living in Germany and working either for Germany or abroad (remote).

  • Previous analysis (2021) can be found here
  • Previously collected raw datasets are here - 2019-2022

As always thanks to everyone participating!

The overall dynamics over 2015 – 2022¶

767 Germany-based participants filled out the questionnaire in December 2022. The line chart below shows the evolution of the base salary (without bonuses and stocks) median from year to year since 2015.

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Cities¶

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Out[9]:
City Count Median
2 Berlin 485 82000.00
11 Munich 144 82500.00
9 Hamburg 27 75000.00
14 Stuttgart 21 72000.00
8 Frankfurt 16 72000.00
10 Karlsruhe 10 76000.00
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Top large cities have seen a significant increase in the median base salary compared to the last two years:

year/city 2020 2021 2022
Berlin 70k 78k 82k
Munich 72k 78k 82,5k
Hamburg 64k 70k 75k

Annual leave for full-time employees¶

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Thirty days of vacation is a standard.

Salaries¶

Employment status¶

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Freelancers make up less than 2 percent of respondents.

Median salaries (EUR/year) per Position¶

Full-time employees¶

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746 Full-time employees. Software engineers at different levels from junior to principal are paid 80k base by median (last year 76k) and 84.5k TC by median.

Work experience¶

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  • 80% of respondents have more than 4 years of work experience.
  • 47% have 5 to 10 years of work experience.
  • 43% of the respondents have worked in Germany for less than 4 years;

Salary by total years of experience¶

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Here is an age/TC curve for engineers. The main salary growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career and then usually bumps into the ceiling of the market.

Salary by levels¶

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The median of base salary of all tech positions is 80k (75k last year), with bonuses and stocks - 86k (80k last year).

Total compensation breakdown¶

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Starting from a senior level employees are usually eligible for stock grants as a part of a total compensation (TC):

  • 42% of respondents higher than middle level get paid a solely base salary (mostly seniors).
  • 14% get more than 20% of TC as stocks and bonuses.

Used technologies¶

Shares of respondents by technologies

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Out[47]:
technology count mean salary w/o bonus (k) percentage
12 Python 185 82990.44 24.2%
6 Java 114 83400.45 14.9%
7 JavaScript / Typescript 103 84946.53 13.4%
10 Other 77 84931.58 10.1%
2 C# / .NET 38 81423.68 5.0%
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This year Python was mentioned significantly more often than Java, whereas they were equal throughout previous years.

Popular add-on technologies¶

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Out[50]:
index count percentage
7 Docker 324 33.00
4 SQL 257 26.00
8 AWS 237 24.00
5 Kubernetes 196 20.00
10 Python 185 19.00
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Docker, AWS, and SQL keep leading year over year. Kubernetes, Tarraform and Clouds (GCP, Asure) are noteworthy.

Salary by Technologies¶

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The box plots represent the base salary distributions of each technology.

Example: Python engineers' median annual base salary is 80k (72k last year), while its distribution varies considerably from 45k to 140k.

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The same technology-based salary distributions plot of TC.

Base salaries & Total Compensation YoY¶

Distribution of base salaries vs. total compensation¶

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Base salary median increased from 75k -> 80k, TC median - from 80k to 85k.

Salaries in Germany over 2015 – 2022¶

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A change in a base salary distribution for this year:

  • it became flatter - more various salaries without a clear peak,
  • it is heavier on the right tail - more high salaries.

TC in big cities¶

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Karlsruhe became more popular than Cologne among respondents in 2022. Overall the distributions in big cities are similar.

Layoffs 2022 and work from home¶

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Out[66]:
Count percentage
Company size
1000+ 116 33.33
101-1000 69 27.94
11-50 14 20.59
51-100 20 25.32
up to 10 1 4.00
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No surprise that most of the layoffs in 2022 took place in big companies (headcount 1000+) - 33% according to responces. 8% of respondents were laid off: half of them with a satisfactory and half with unsatisfactory severance package.

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Out[69]:
No                                                 91.20
Yes, I am NOT satisfied with a severance package    5.09
Yes, I am satisfied with a severance package        3.24
Name: layoff affects you, dtype: float64
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Out[70]:
No                61.15
100 - 500         15.91
over 1000 euros    8.21
500 - 1000         6.52
up to 100 euro     5.48
Name: Work From Home allowance, dtype: float64

30% of respondents got a work from home allowance from their employer. Usually, it was between 100 and 500 euros.

If you liked this survey and results help you - buy me a coffe.

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Author: Ksenia Legostay